Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“We try to figure out what, in any case, and in any case within a case, or potential case within cases, make that more likely. The scenic continuity from ritual, to the juridical, to the scientific can only be sustained by ensuring the integrity of each and every scene, organized around an ostensive, even if virtual, center, which means sharply scrutinizing and when necessarily resisting the tendency to treat anywhere in the world as conditions easily made suitably “laboritorial”—a tendency, it must be said, indulged in less by scientists or engineers themselves than by politicians hoping to leverage the scientific to justify their own violation of juridical scenic norms. The means of generating this kind of disciplinary space, the kind occupied by a new officer class, scientifically and technologically competent while engaged in the revivification of their various sites of origin and modes of entry into juridical form, is grammatical—the sentence is to be leveraged. Language remains, and I think will remain, our most powerful form of data processing. The declarative sentence, in its literate form, with its constituents made explicit, is one of the great human accomplishments. You have a subject, or topic, what we are talking about, involving an at least imaginable ostensive; a predicate, or comment, what we are saying about the topic, whatever singles it out, as either a target or site to be protected; and we have the modifiers, each of which provide us with information about the subject or predicate, or something that is itself providing us with information about the subject or predicate.”

— Adam Katz, Originary Calculus · Apr 22, 2022 · Bouvard Substack